Abstract
Seasonality of suicidal behavior has been widely reported in many epidemiological studies with a well replicated suicide peak in spring followed by a trough in winter season. Research from some regions over the past few decades has shown a diminishing seasonal pattern of suicides and this introduced a new perspective on the suicide study. Data on all suicide deaths from the period 1991 to 2015 was extracted from the South Korean National Death Registration data set which was made available by Statistics Korea. Our findings confirmed a strong seasonal effect of suicides in South Korea throughout the study period and a marked diminishing pattern was observed since the period of 2006–2010. The rhythm of suicides kept changing across the time intervals with a spring peak followed by a second peak in late summer/autumn. The seasonality varied across age groups and the seasonal effect among the Korean elderly suicides was still found to be significant though a diminishing pattern was observed recently.
Highlights
Seasonality of suicidal behavior has widely been reported in many epidemiological studies with a well replicated suicide peak in spring followed by a trough in winter season [1,2,3,4]
We explored the seasonal pattern of suicide by age group and their corresponding significance at different time interval was recorded as well
Our results confirmed the presence of monthly variation of suicides at different time intervals and the well replicated spring peak was noted in South Korea
Summary
Seasonality of suicidal behavior has widely been reported in many epidemiological studies with a well replicated suicide peak in spring followed by a trough in winter season [1,2,3,4]. Chew and McCleary [5] evaluated the influence of social and bioclimatic factors by using 28 countries cross-sectional time series data and reported those populations in the temperature zone exhibiting suicide seasonality. Woo et al [4] studied those articles published from 1979 to 2011 regarding the seasonal variation of suicide rates and summarized a highly replicated peak in spring time. Christodoulou et al [3] reviewed seasonality of suicide studies in both Northern and Southern hemisphere countries and noted most of them reporting seasonality in spring peak and early summer. There were some studies, reporting no evidence of seasonal variation in suicide mortality [9,10,11,12,13]
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